Prioritize Your Wedding: Discussing What’s Important

It’s wedding season, and you might be feeling overwhelmed with wedding planning. As a newly engaged soonly-wed, there are so many things to consider before the big day comes! How can you make sure that your wedding is everything that you hope it will be? First and most importantly, here's the key to making wedding planning easier on yourself: Prioritize what matters most.

Having clearly-defined priorities both as individuals and as a couple, allows you to focus on the most important elements of your wedding and will make bringing your vision to life much easier. Start by discussing what you and your partner would like to happen on your wedding day and how you’d both like to feel.

How To Identify Your Wedding Priorities

Your priorities should truly reflect the things that matter most to the two of you. Take a moment and discuss your priorities as individuals and as a couple. Your wedding absolutely has to have certain elements in order for it to be successful, but there are also plenty of other things that you could care less about, so determine what matters most to you.

Make a list of both your absolute needs and, the things that you could care less about. Writing it out makes the planning process easier, saves time, and helps ensure that you won’t miss anything important! It also allows you to see what is less important to you so that you know when to compromise.

Remember, there are no wrong priorities and your priorities don’t have to be the same as anyone else's! Prioritizing what matters most is important for both you and your partner so that you can focus on what truly counts during wedding planning.

For example: We care less about whether or not our wedding has live music and more about hiring a good photographer (even though it is important). We're okay with having an iPhone playlist at our ceremony if needed!

How To Define Your Wedding Priorities

Understanding why you need clearly-defined priorities can seem easy enough, but actually determining what your priorities are, can be a little tricky. In order to help my clients discover what their priorities are, I’ve come up with a few questions that I’d like you to ask one another. The questions are as follows:

How do you want to feel on your wedding day? What are you most looking forward to about your wedding day? What are you most nervous about? What do you absolutely need to happen on your wedding day in order for it to be successful? How would each of you describe a perfect wedding day and/or reception (in detail)? What are some things you would like to see happen at your wedding?

What do these questions all have in common? The answers will help guide you in identifying your priorities so that you are crystal clear about what matters and what does not.

How To Rank Your Priorities

Once you've identified your priorities, it's time to rank them in order of importance. List out your priorities and treat this exercise like a speed test; assign each of your priorities the first number that comes to your mind ranging from one through five. One should mean that you literally do not care AT ALL about it, whereas five should mean that it is of the UTMOST importance to you.

As you rank your preferences, remember to express why you ranked each item the way that you did. Why is it extremely important to you? What does the priority mean to your overall vision for your day and how do you want to feel?

This list can be especially helpful when communicating with your vendor team so that they know which elements are a MUST and they understand the WHY behind them. It also helps your vendors to understand exactly what is most meaningful to you as a couple, which in turn helps them get to know you better.

In conclusion, you need to understand your wedding priorities because they allow you to focus on the most important elements of wedding planning and they help you to better communicate your vision for your day. You can define your wedding priorities by asking yourself and your soon-to-be spouse questions about what you want to feel on your wedding day, what's most important to you both, and how would each of you describe your perfect wedding. Finally, rank these priorities from one through five based on their importance to you as an individual and as a couple.

Wedding Planning Tip: In the next blog post, we will discuss how to communicate your wedding priorities to vendors.

Happy planning! xoxo